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Point-in-time recovery (PITR) backups

PITR maintains versions of your database from past timestamps, serving as a safeguard against data loss during various disasters, including database crashes, accidental data deletions, table drops, or unintended updates to multiple fields instead of a single one.

PITR complements on-demand and scheduled backup strategies by providing finer backup granularity with more specific recovery points for restoring data to the same cluster.

How it works

Restoring databases up to a specific moment in time involves retrieving data from a backup snapshot and replaying all subsequent events that occurred until a specified moment using oplog slices.

When PITR and backups are enabled (either on-demand or scheduled), Everest starts capturing successive database transaction logs at predefined intervals. As soon as the initial full backup is available, Everest can start restoring the database from these PITR transaction logs.

Since Everest saves transaction logs and streams them into your storage between scheduled task runs, scheduling frequent backups is not necessary. You can use the available transaction logs in your storage to restore a backup to any moment between snapshots.

Supported scenarios

Currently, PITR is only available for MySQL databases. Future releases will enable this functionality for MongoDB and PostgreSQL databases as well.

Enable Point-in-time recovery

Prerequisites

Before enabling PITR, go to Settings > Backup Storages and check that you have an available AWS S3-compatible location for storing backups. Otherwise, create a backup location so Everest can store PITR artifacts for the database.

To enable PITR:

  1. On the Percona Everest homepage, click Create Database to display the database creation wizard.
  2. Fill in the details of your database on the first steps of the wizard.
  3. Navigate to the Backups page, and make sure to enable and configure a backup schedule.
  4. Click Next to go to the Point-in-time recovery (PITR) page where you can enable PITR and specify a location for storing the PITR backups and oplogs.
  5. Complete the setup wizard to create the new database with PITR enabled.
  1. In the Databases view, select the database for which you want to enable PITR.
  2. Click the Actions menu next to the database, then click Edit.
  3. Navigate through the database configuration wizard to get to the Backups page where you can configure a backup schedule that will create an initial full backup required for PITR.
  4. Complete the setup wizard to schedule a full backup and enable PITR for the existing database.

Next step

Restore backups

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